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From: Joseph Wright <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Sat, January 1, 2011 2:56:24 PM
Subject: Re: LaTeX3 and engines

On 01/01/2011 20:43, Khaled Hosny wrote:
> Just wondering, what benefit pdftex have over luatex (with the later
> being an extension of the former), or is it about people who are not
> willing/can't switch to new engine? Do we expect such people to be
> welling/able to switch to latex3 either?

At present there is not too much of an issue: we don't have any working functionality for LaTeX3 where this question really shows up. This may change once we have some font stuff. (As I said, I have some ideas in this area, which include 'shameless rip-off fontspec'.)

There is quite a large body of stuff which doesn't really need LuaTeX: stuff in western European languages using fonts already available to TeX. I suspect that forcing this subset of work to drop pdfTeX, which is quite capable of doing the job, might be consider a bit 'over the top'.

As I said earlier, we decided to require \pdfstrcmp after some applications came up where the alternatives were a bad idea (difference in expandability with different supported engines). So this might change as we develop more code. I can only comment on what we have now, where there is no strong case for dropping support for pdfTeX. (Indeed, almost all of the day-to-day testing I do uses pdfTeX as it remains my default engine. LuaTeX is a lot slower, I'm afraid, quite apart from questions about bugs introduced by the ongoing changes.)
--
Joseph Wright